Epub Export

[wchous2]

I can't get my Sony Reader to open an epub export from Nisus Pro. I use the Sony PRS-950 reader, with the latest update of Nisus Pro. When I export my document, the icon on the desktop displays the Digital Editions logo, but is always only 8K in size. Adobe then gives this message: Nisus Witnesses.epub:
The document appears to have minor errors that might cause it to be displayed incorrectly
--- errorListChange ---

Ideas?

Thanks, C

[D-Sky]

I get the same error message when I try to open an ePub created with Nisus in Calibre.

[martin]

Unfortunately I don't have a Sony Reader with which to test. Is the file displaying correctly, or do you notice anything amiss?

I get the same error message when I try to open an ePub created with Nisus in Calibre.

I opened a moderately complex EPUB document (several chapters, TOC entries, etc) in Calibre and didn't experience this either. What version of Calibre are you using? I have Calibre 0.8.66. If you have the latest versions of Calibre and Nisus Writer Pro, then perhaps it's something special about your document? Perhaps you could send us the original to test with.

I also tested against Adobe Digital Editions (which I find nicer than Calibre), and didn't encounter any error messages.

[D-Sky]

When I try to open the ePub imported in Calibre, I get this message " No valid entries in the spine of this EPUB". I have the latest versions of NW and Calibre.

I join the zipped file.

[D-Sky]

Here the ePub created with NW. (zipped since epub files are not allowed as attachment)

[Groucho]

Hello D-Sky.

I tried to open the file with Firefox’s add-on EpubReader. It failed. This is the message:

Code: Select all

Sorry, unfortunately an error occured during opening your ePub-book :(. Please help us improving EPUBReader and send the following information to epubread@gmail.com. Thank you!
------------------ start: Sat, 25 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT
store: begin
store: /Users/Henry/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/mnzl708d.default/epub/68/68.epub
store: end
zip: begin
zip: end
getContent: begin
readFile: begin, /Users/Henry/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/mnzl708d.default/epub/68/META-INF/container.xml
readFile: end
readFile: begin, /Users/Henry/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/mnzl708d.default/epub/68/OEBPS/content.opf
readFile: end
TypeError: itemref is undefined

A file of mine I exported to Epub from NWP opened smoothly. Hence there should be something amiss with your rtf, I guess.

Greetings, Henry

[D-Sky]

I tried with a different RTF file

GRÉGOIRE DE NYSSE.rtf

(85.23 KiB) Downloaded 931 times

(joined), same result. I think there is a problem with the epub converter.

GRÉGOIRE DE NYSSE.epub.zip

(19.41 KiB) Downloaded 1481 times

[martin]

Thank you all very much for your help and example documents! It turns out the problem is something a bit silly and embarrassing. If a document doesn't contain any TOC entries, Nisus Writer Pro will emit an empty "spine" in the EPUB, which controls what content should be displayed. With no entries in the spine, the EPUB readers will not show the document content.

Obviously we need to fix this, but in the meantime it's easy to workaround. You just need to select any text in your document and apply any "Include in TOC" level (you can do this directly or by applying a style that enforces TOC inclusion). Sorry for the trouble.

[greenmorpher]

Many thanks Martin for digging out the problem and (good grief!) explaining it!!!

Is this a first for a software company? Or maybe not for Nisus but certainly for lots of others?

Cheers, geoff

[D-Sky]

Thank you Martin, its works perfectly.

Nisus is really a great company!

Désiré Rusovsky from Switzerland

Ps: I just needed to figure out what TOC stand for since my menus are in French language. => TDM

[George Maschke]

Thanks to all who posted about and found the workaround for this issue. I'm considering whether to do the page layout for a book in Nisus Pro or Apple Pages, and EPUB export is a key consideration. I was also encountering the error message, "No valid entries in the spine of this EPUB" in Calibre with test documents that I created with Nisus Pro. This was a show-stopper for me. But now I'm leaning toward using Nisus Pro, especially in view of Pages' lack of support for cross-references.

[martin]

That's great to hear- I'm glad the workaround allows you to export EPUBs properly. Of course we'll get this fixed for the next update. Thanks again for everyone's help here.

[George Maschke]

When I submit an EPUB document created with Nisus to this validator, numerous errors are reported:

http://validator.idpf.org/

I have attached the report as a zipped HTML file. There are numerous instances of this error:

element "div" not allowed here; expected the element end-tag, text or element "a", "abbr", "acronym", "applet", "b", "bdo", "big", "br", "cite", "code", "del", "dfn", "em", "i", "iframe", "img", "ins", "kbd", "map", "noscript", "ns:svg", "object", "q", "samp", "script", "small", "span", "strong", "sub", "sup", "tt" or "var" (with xmlns:ns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg")

and a couple of this one:

The element type "span" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</span>".

By contrast, a similar EPUB created with Pages validates without errors. Perhaps the problem has something to do with the fact that I didn't compose the Nisus document in Nisus. I exported it from Pages as a .doc file, then imported it into Nisus and then created the EPUB. But in any event, such errors shouldn't happen, should they? I'm also attaching the EPUB file I created from Nisus and the Nisus file.

[George Maschke]

I've re-composed the first few pages of my book entirely in Nisus Pro and am also receiving validation errors on EPUB output. I've attached the report, the Nisus file, and the EPUB file.

[martin]

Hi George,

Thank you very much for posting those sample documents, along with the EPUB and validator results; I've been able to observe the same validation errors. They aren't serious errors, in that they don't prevent viewing the document in EPUB readers or using kindlegen, but naturally we should get them fixed.

I can go over the two errors you're seeing, in case you're curious:

element "div" not allowed here; expected the element end-tag, text or element

This error occurs when NWP emits a page break. The div code used to force the break should not be nested inside a paragraph tag.

The element type "span" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</span>".

This occurs at the very end of each chapter file in the EPUB container, where the span tag has incorrectly been left open.

Thanks again for your help.